Aging & Wisdom Quote by Marianne Moore

Moore turns the poet-critic relationship into a mythic piggyback ride, and the joke lands because it’s not really a joke. The image of “regions of enchantment” flatters poetry’s private sovereignty: the poem as a terrain you enter alone, under its own laws, answerable only to wonder. Then she punctures that reverie with the critic “forever…upon his back,” borrowing the Old Man of the Sea from Sinbad: a parasitic rider who clings, drains, and won’t be shaken. It’s a surprisingly physical metaphor for what often feels abstract - interpretation as weight, vigilance as a kind of captivity.

The intent isn’t anti-intellectual; Moore was famously exacting, a poet with a curator’s eye and a moralist’s rigor. The cruelty she names is subtler: once you make art public, you inherit a shadow companion. Even in the act of wandering - the freest verb she could pick - the poet is already being monitored, categorized, improved, or dismissed. “Quite cruel” is classic Moore restraint, a prim understatement masking real irritation at how criticism can follow the artist into the studio, colonize the imagination, and replace experience with accounting.

Context matters: Moore wrote in a modernist moment when poets were also their own gatekeepers, writing reviews, manifestos, and defenses of difficulty. Her subtext reads like an insider’s lament: the critic isn’t an outsider banging on the door; he’s fused to the poet’s back, inseparable from the era’s obsession with explanation and authority. Enchantment is the point, she implies, and the critic’s endless presence risks turning magic into homework.